


Beat

by TeaCub90



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Max's Garden, Morse is kind of a poetry snob
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26821015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaCub90/pseuds/TeaCub90
Summary: He’s surrounded by the most beautiful of chaotic greenery; a rumpled detective-sergeant could indeed disappear here, fall down and curl up, away from the criminals, the guns, the corruption among their ranks. Away from the accusations and the arguing and the ageless, endless violence.Morse grounds himself, with a friend's support.
Relationships: Max DeBryn & Endeavour Morse
Comments: 17
Kudos: 22





	Beat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mud_Lark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mud_Lark/gifts).



> So, wow...*deep breath* I'm back after a long time away; this is the first fic I've posted since July. The interim has been filled with ups and downs; I went through a lot this lockdown and Endeavour was one of a few things that helped. I still haven't quite sorted myself out but I'm now on antidepressants and am back in work, at least. Hope everyone here is staying safe and well; my love to you all. 
> 
> This is dedicated to my dear fellow fan Mud_Lark, for all the incomparable support, encouragement and wonderful, distracting fandom talk they gave this summer. <3

* * *

He lies in the grass and he closes his eyes.

He can hear the cheeps and twitters of the birds reverberate in their chorus, in an almost-chiding circle above his head – birdsong, there’s always birdsong here, in Max’s garden – and he listens, with no hope of identifying which species is which by sound alone. Max can, though; uncanny talent of his and Morse feels his mouth chuff up at the corners at the way the doctor can rattle off the type of almost any kind of bird who comes in to feed, along with Housman quotations and the different kinds of fishing-rod to hand.

He puts a hand to his stomach; breathes. In, and out – slow, deliberate; away from the beer-bottles, away from the traffic and sirens. Splays a hand in the grass beneath him, turns his head, opens his eyes to the strands around him, the daisies now close to towers above his eyes, staring down upon him, almost questioning. He’s surrounded by the most beautiful of chaotic greenery; a rumpled detective-sergeant could indeed disappear here, fall down and curl up, away from the criminals, the guns, the corruption among their ranks. Away from the accusations and the arguing and the ageless, endless violence. He imagines Max coming to find him sometime in the winter, washed gently awake by chilly dew-drops and weak glimmers of oversleeping sun, all glasses and gown with a strong, sweet tea and a tenderly biting comment.

He lifts a finger, lays it against a delicate daisy petal, watches it bow gently. Teases the dust-like middle with care; remembers Joyce making daisy chains at his father’s house. Exhales as he remembers that he needs to call her.

Shifting his head, his chin upwards, he takes in the endless sky above his head – _world without end, amen,_ his mother’s soft murmurs at the Quaker house – feels the disconcerting nature of the thing; if he were to move his feet, his body, lift his whole self off the ground, he could walk upwards and fall into it, spread his arms like a carefree fool for once, leave the murder and the grim mayhem to the rest of the world, fall into something besides the easy willingness of a woman’s arms, even if just for a night.

He digs his toes into the ground, en-pointe, brushing his feet against his discarded shoes, splayed next to his shins. His hands dig into the grass; into the ground; into the soft, yielding soil. He’ll have dirty nails later that he’ll have to clean before he sees Mr. Bright again; right now, he does not care. Takes in one deep breath, and lets it out. And again. And again. The whoosh and the wheeze of his own gentle breath. He doesn’t think he’s ever been so _aware_ of it before; of his own lungs, his own air, in and out, open and free to feel it, in his time, at his leisure. Feels it only in bursting stirrups when he’s chasing a criminal; kept every sound as quiet as possible in that prison-cell, folding his arms across his chest, staring wide-eyed – sometimes black-eyed, a prison is no place for a policeman – beneath his cellmate’s bunk, unable to look to his left and out at the dark, airless room.

Now, there’s only space, and sky, and colour.

A shuffling to his left and he looks up to see Max himself approach, holding two glasses of cool, icy lemonades, cloudy and welcoming; one of which he silently hands off to Morse as he sits up straight, immediately to attention.

‘Thankyou,’ he murmurs. With his jacket shucked off, his tie undone and his shoes gone to grass, it’s easy to feel a little sheepish, suddenly, but Max says nothing; simply lowers himself into the grass beside him with a small grunt, sipping his own lemonade with a satisfied sigh; his sleeves are drawn up and he rests the bare elbow on a kneecap as he draws his knees up. Morse watches him – surprised and yet not – waits for Max to say something, anything – to comment on his laziness, his lethargy. But the doctor seems to have nothing to give; simply smiles, holds his glass out with a soft kind of pointedness – his turf, his rules of hospitality – and Morse humours him, the clink of the glass the only communication, the only sound between them, since Max sent him out here.

They both sip the cold buzz – it’s gorgeous, delicious, fizzing Morse’s throat in all the right ways and he swallows gratefully, watching bees zip in and out of the flowers, over heads of colour, vaguely aware of Max’s satisfied ‘ah’ as he contemplates himself, running from house to house in need of his own nectar; his own key for the case, that missing link he almost missed entire.

Too late. He always seems to be too late. He hums, his whole expression faltering; can feel himself falling in the downwards slope of his eyes, his mouth; looking away from Max – only for a hand to reach out and fix itself firmly to his shoulder.

‘You’re not to blame for what happened today,’ Max’s voice is kind, knowing, sad all in one; gently pressing with the softest push, bringing him back, anchoring him to the earth. ‘You’re not to blame, Morse.’ 

Morse smiles, a small thing but grateful all the same – odd, really, how much he wasn’t expecting to hear those words from anyone; as a policeman, as a detective, he became used to them becoming a noticeably absent part of the repertoire. It’s always about the families, the people left behind – never what he himself has walked away with, whether it be a battered face or a slashed stomach or simply a pocketful of guilt. You swallow it down, swallow the grief of the bereaved and you tell yourself you _tried,_ and you try and believe that in turn at the bottom of a pint of beer.

(And you try not to take it personally, even when it was an actual tiger trying to maul you).

‘Don’t you usually have a Housman or a Pope for this sort of thing?’ he asks into his glass now (more to dissuade memories of another summer; of that hungry, ravenous cat, the whimpering sobs of Julia Mortmaigne in his ear, her son’s cries). Recognises belatedly that that’s altogether a little bit dry, and frankly rather ill-mannered of him. Max however just _hums,_ apparently unoffended, shifting his glasses, wiping his shining forehead and raising his round face to the sun.

‘I had a feeling you might consider it a bit too hot for that.’

‘No,’ Morse licks the lemonade off his lips and is startled to find how much he means it; takes a strange kind of pleasure in Max’s lifted poetics, a rare look into the man’s personal psyche in their early days, before the body of a child cracked his usually unflappable façade wide open. Max scrutinises him for a moment, as though unsure, and then takes a swig.

‘Any requests?’ he asks, looking quite serious; Morse pauses.

‘Surprise me,’ he shrugs, feeling oddly daring and Max adjusts his glasses in a way that suggests he intends to do just that; it causes Morse’s own smirk to grow in turn and he takes a measured sip of his drink; his pulse, he realises belatedly, has calmed; his breathing has evened out, by cause of Max’s company, the comfort of his easy tones.

‘Well then. _I’m with you in Rockland,’_ Max meets his eyes unapologetically and Morse chuffs; of course, it’s just like Max to choose Allen Ginsberg out of sheer, unadulterated spite. _‘Where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses.’_

It’s calm, measured, like a sip of whiskey; something caught between automatic and almost thoughtful, yet reassuringly so and Morse feels his slight smirk fading as he simply listens. A quiet, compared to the frantic _noise_ of hours ago that somehow feel like a lifetime away now, racing through the city, feet pounding the pavement, Thursday’s barks at his back.

It alarms him, _Howl._ All the Beats alarm him, if he’s honest; their nonsensical way of looking at things, their leading down a jagged path towards another plain where he already feels thrown enough by vicious killers, fighting his way back to justice, towards the light, towards the familiar, every time. He does more than enough of that in his everyday working life, much to the consternation of everyone around him, including Max himself.

And yet there’s something comforting about it – about Max choosing to jump towards the end, to the third and final stanza; somehow characteristic of him, even, to steer away from the predictable beginning of _‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’_ preserved for the much more simplistic. There has been madness, out in Oxford today, but it’s finished; a murderer has been locked up. The howling and the chaos; the chase and the charge-sheet, has been completed.

 _‘I’m with you in Rockland,’_ Max continues, his gaze wandering as he continues to speak, leaning back on his hands, surveying his little kingdom. Despite the rushed impression Morse gets from these poems on the page, when Max states the lines, he says them slower, more thoughtful, as though in some quiet rebellion, whether against the lines or the authors themselves. _‘In my dreams, you walk – dripping,’_ and this particular pause is pointed enough, critical enough to put Morse in mind of his own leaking blood, slashes and bullet-wounds, injuries he’s required Max to patch up, _‘From a sea-journey, on the highway across_ – well, Oxford, I suppose,’ he amends with a raised eyebrow. Morse snorts quietly, dropping his head at the casual cheek, the fact that Max wasn’t fanciful enough to transport them to another continent in loyalty towards the correct lines, _‘in tears, to the door of my cottage –’_

 _‘In the Western night,’_ Morse concludes, giving into the inevitable and nods, grateful that Max didn’t linger over the last few words, meeting him right at the very end. ‘Sounds about right.’ In the Western night, with its Western problems and the usual Western motives of not being loved enough, so often it seems leading to murder.

 _In tears…_ he looks towards his hands, shaking much less now, dirty not with blood from Oxford gravel but with the fresh soil of Max’s ground; no longer rattling like his heart, his breath, no longer scrabbling at Max’s door knocker. They came so close - so, so close - to losing someone today, and every dead girl, every woman with dark hair or red lips or sparkling eyes takes him back – back to Venice and the curtain call of his own vices, his _stupidity._ Italy, dark with winter, and the threat of yet another year of mistakes.

He twirls a single finger around some of the longer grass-stems, the piping line of them tight against his skin. Sighs and lets it go, drops his guard; drops his tired-heavy head to rest on Max’s shoulder, the echo of his merciful recitation, high and clear, tempered by the flutter of the bees, the lazy whisper of a slight breeze that ruffles the trees that hide them away from the world. He’s not drunk; he’s achingly sober and maybe that’s part of the problem – but Max doesn’t shoo him off, simply rubs his back in a brisk but gentle sweep, a welcome pressure of contact.

‘You’ll be alright,’ he tells him simply and leaves it there; his solid, stout shoulder his rest and Morse inhales, exhales; inhales again, cups his hands around the solidity of his glass, the reassurance of Max right beside him, the sunlight hot against his hair.

All-being.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Max quotes from the famous 'Howl' by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.


End file.
